Stories

The Virginia Quarterly Reviewhas archived a story, “Preservation,” and other work I have contributed to the magazine, on their Web site. The reviews I wrote for the late editor, Staige Blackford, include a discussion of one of my favorite novels, John Banville’s The Untouchable, a fictionalized account of the Cambridge spies narrated by an art historian who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sir Anthony Blunt.

In addition to VQR, my writing has also appeared in the Sewanee Review, whose generous, incisive, and venerable editor, George Core, contributed the title, “Ministers of Fire,” to a story I published in that journal in 2000. [The link will take you to the issue in JSTOR, if you have access.] The story had been called “Teacher Chen’s Last Day,” which was, as George pointed out, a bit callow to describe what happens to the protagonist. The story won the Andrew S. Lytle fiction prize from the magazine in 2001, and became the core of my novel of the same name. George Core also published my essay-reviews on the Anglo-Irish writer J.G Farrell, Tom Wolfe, and Robert Stone.